Can someone pause Al Gore for the next decade?
It is, we are told, as inevitable and inexorable as night follows day that, as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up, so too does the temperature of the world. Inconveniently for this axiomatic truth, however, while carbon dioxide has continued to increase the temperature of the planet has stayed flat over the past decade and even recently dropped like a stone. Never mind: man-made global warming turns out to be the most obliging of theories because now we are told that this inexorable process of heating is now to take a ten-year pause.
The Telegraph tells us that global warming is to stop
while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions… This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Naturebut only until 2015, apparently, when it will start up again.
So let’s get this right. More carbon dioxide means more global warming — except when, er, ‘natural variations in climate’ which are apparently immune to this immutable process (fancy!) get in the way. With a precision of prediction which would have caused medieval sorcerers to strike crystal balls off their wedding present lists, these scientists can foretell precisely when these ‘natural climate variations’ will subside — even though at the very same time Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre confides:
…climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain…Always uncertain, eh? But isn’t the prediction that the planet is about to fry so certain that, as the Royal Society so memorably told us, the argument is over?
Truly, a most flexible theory indeed. One can only marvel.